https://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-latimes-owners-20180617-htmlstory.html

At the same time, Chandler began buying property where that water would end up. One of his syndicates, the Los Angeles Suburban Homes Company, purchased the 47,500-acre Van Nuys ranch for $2.5 million. Chandler foresaw subdivisions and towns covering the valley from mountainous edge to edge, and made millions off the vision.

A Chandler syndicate helped establish the township of Hollywood, and encouraged the budding film industry to locate there. When, for instance, Chandler learned that a filmmaker lured to San Francisco was sidelined by fog, he sent a delegation to inform the crew that it was sunny in Los Angeles and loaded them on a train south.

In 1920, when Donald Douglas, an aircraft engineer, arrived in Los Angeles with an order from the Navy for three torpedo planes, Chandler made sure he got the financing he needed.

Douglas Aircraft helped jump-start the aerospace industry and manufacturing in general in Southern California. That economy, more than Hollywood or the oil fields, built the region’s postwar middle class. Aerospace workers and their families filled subdivisions — with swimming pools and birds of paradise — from Long Beach and Downey to Glendale and Chatsworth.

Chandler was involved in creating the Hollywood Bowl, Caltech, the Coliseum, the Biltmore and Ambassador hotels, Santa Anita Park, the Hollywood sign, Trans World Airlines. His family owned the Tejon Ranch and huge expanses of land in Baja California, the Imperial Valley and New Mexico and beyond.